Rocchi’s Retro Rental: No Country for Anyone

I don’t know if I can quite explain the thought process that goes into this column — basically, it’s based on whatever movie’s floating around my head that week — but I can try to articulate it for this week’s edition. See, Sundance had me thinking about Michael Haneke after I saw his brilliant, terrifying English language remake of his own Funny Games, and that made me want to go back to the films of his I hadn’t seen. And No Country for Old Men had been on my mind, since I figured it was going to win the Oscar (and, more importantly, deserved to) and thinking about No Country made me think about Cormac McCarthy, which made me think of The Road, his prize-winning novel about a father and son roaming a blasted landscape after some unexplained event has destroyed society. This is almost exactly the same plot as Haneke’s The Time of the Wolf (Le Temps Des Loup) — which, in fact, I’d never seen. So I did. And so, this edition.

For those of you who don’t know Haneke, he’s the writer-director of some of the best European films we’ve seen in the past decade — Cache, The Piano Teacher, Code Unknown — and he’s about to make his American bow with a shot-for-shot remake of one of his own films, Funny Games. The Time of the Wolf is in many ways an archetypal Haneke film; many of his films are about what happens to people when the thin veneer of civilized behavior gets stripped away to reveal the rawness underneath. But in The Time of the Wolf, the scale is made immensely broad while still staying deeply immediate. There’s no exposition or titles at the beginning of the film explaining what’s happened, no prologue or voice-over; a family is heading for their place in the country, and the frantic worry and thin edge behind every request the mother and father make of their daughter and son make it clear something’s wrong.

And then bad things happen, and we get a glimpse of just how wrong things are. The mother, Anne (Isabelle Huppert) is reduced to roaming the countryside with her daughter Eva (Anais Demoustier) and son Ben (Lucas Biscome), trying to find food and shelter. There’s no electricity. The river water may be contaminated. The streets are lit by flames leaping off mass pyres of dead livestock. And all the things in life you used to not even think about and merely expect — your home, your bed, your next meal — have gone.

Haneke’s directorial style isn’t easy to take; you get long scenes, the locked-down unblinking eye of the camera taking everything in dispassionately. Moment of great power play out in the gray, grim light of quiet horrible moments before dawn. There are long silent sequences; Huppert’s mix of numb shell shock and raw-nerve terror plays out on her face in every scene. The trio connects with other refugees from the city; their conversations are either blunt power plays or small talk that slides into apocalyptic prophecy and madness. The train came through a few days ago. Plans are made to slow it or stop it if it comes through again. The ragtag band has a purpose. That’s not enough.

And again, this is not your usual end-of-the-world scenario; the model is not Mad Max but Waiting for Godot; the French setting and grim portents evoke Godard’s Week End, but without that film’s comforting sleek cloak of irony blunting the sharp edges of the scenario. Haneke’s said one of his aims was to plunge a Western audience into the kind of chaos and terror we see played out in brief newsblips from other parts of the world; as Anne’s fight to keep herself and her children alive and safe grows more and more perilous, we’re at the edge of our seats with the sheer tension of it. And Haneke’s other films have explored the gulf between haves and have-nots (most notably the brilliant Cache), but in The Time of the Wolf the haves become the have-nots, fast, and they have no clue what to do about it. The Road is heading for the big screen — Viggo Mortensen’s been cast in the lead, which is to me a huge mistake; Viggo versus the end of the world seems like a fair fight. (Reading the book, I kept imagining William H. Macy as the father, but never mind.) Ironically, The Time of the Wolf feels more faithful to the bleak poetry of McCarthy’s book than I worry the official Hollywood adaptation will be. Again, The Time of the Wolf is not an easy movie to watch, violent and visceral and full of heartbreaking moments of tragedy and even hope, but these are in many ways desperate times; The Time of the Wolf is an unwelcome reminder of how many things we take for granted — streetlights and Oscar nights, warmth and water and safety and law — and a haunting warning about how fragile they really are.